Comment by anta40 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anta40 | Hacker News Reader

Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming.

MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions.

Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advanced for a high school kids, since most of my friends were interested in music or games :)

I never used Pascal/Delphi for work though, because Java has been a major player in mobile development scene (J2ME -> BlackBerry -> Android....).

One of the things I appreciate about Pascal compilers is: blazing fast compile time. And I think it still applies to FPC (Free Pascal Compiler).

You can rebuild the whole compiler + basic libraries from scratch under 5 minutes. Can't say the same thing about GCC. Well the last time I did this was in 2014 (or 2015?), though.

Now, if I want a native compiler with fast compilation speed, I'd pick Go or Nim.....

The latest version of Delphi compiles 1 billion lines of code in 5 minutes on a 16 core 5950X and 2 minutes on a 64 core 3990X.

Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.)

We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C previously). But I still prefer Pascal's overall 'ideology' and syntax over C (except for the BEGIN ... END - would prefer braces :).

May be obvious to some, but the braces can be replaced by BEGIN and END keywords by multiple methods, including careful editor search and replace, or use of a preprocessor before compiling (may not handle tokens in strings or comments), or maybe the best option, by hotkey mappings, like BEGIN to some key combo, and END to another.

Oh yeah, I do know that with modern editors it's not such a chore anymore. I just mentioned that as an example of verbosity that slightly annoys me. (The same with Ada too, which I understand also draws inspiration from Pascal).

Yes, I get you now. Agree about the verbosity issue, although, interestingly, it did not bother me at all in Pascal, which I learned as my 2nd language or so, before C. Noticed it even in the syntax of BCPL (C's grandpa), and, IIRC, BLISS, and of course Eiffel. The 2nd- and 3rd-last above were before my time, only read about them in books. I like Eiffel for many reasons, though. A real pity it did not get more popular.

I found BCPL quite cool too, except for the verbosity, which, like Pascal, I did not much feel at the time. I read the whole (slim) book about it, by Martin Richards, its creator, and enjoyed it. Good amount of low-level system programming examples in the book, and it all being in a language with only one type (the machine word), made it more fun to me, although (or because) I did not know of higher level programming constructs at the time.

Its history and uses are interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

Java, .NET [0] and D do it for me.

But I do share a similar Pascal story, just a decade earlier. :)

[0] - People keep forgetting there are AOT toolchains (and JIT caches) for them.

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